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Listen up, budding Masters Of The Universe, and all those who dream of walking their path to wealth, power and spacious summer homes.

At many business schools, boot-camp week--where the unwashed get a taste of debits, credits and such--starts in less than a month. After that, and just beneath the throb of your hangover (a B-school accessory), you will detect another inexorable rhythm--a faint ticking to be precise. This is the tell-tale heart to your two-year, $100,000 investment. The relentless reminder that you better get to learnin' (or at least networking), lest you end up working for, and maybe getting laid off by, one of your classmates one day.

Now for the good--or totally vexing--news, depending how you take it: After all the spreadsheets and cost-of-capital calculations, after all the case studies and Power Point presentations, after all the tuition money is gone and it's just you and your pedigree, contacts and gumption, guess what?

As anyone who employs people and writes checks will confirm, turning $1 into a $1.10 is a real bitch. Turning that $1.10 into $1.25, even tougher. I had to laugh the other day when a former colleague, now a partner at a boutique digital-marketing firm, sent me the following text out of the blue: "Generating positive cash flow is one of the hardest f---ing things in the world." And then some, Matt.

For all the wonderful instruction at places like Harvard, Wharton and my alma mater, the Stern School of Business at NYU, b-schoolers should remember that making money involves so much more than columns in a spreadsheet and the ever-shifting assumptions behind them.

With that in mind, here's a supplemental, 10-step curriculum:

1. If It Ain't Broke, Still Fix It

One of the hardest decisions business owners have to make is turning their backs on cash when it's flowing. But that's exactly what you must have the courage to do sometimes to protect your franchise. Think about all those aggressive mortgage underwriters who scooped up fees by the shovelful during the housing bubble, when they should have been tightening their lending criteria. Or USA Inc., which ran deficits for years--because, well, our creditors didn't seem to mind--and now faces a staggering $60 trillion fiscal hole (including the present value of all future obligations to its entitlement programs).